I had forgotten that Shinseki was the US commander in Bosnia before he became Army Chief of Staff at the Pentagon and then got canned for saying the job in Iraq would be too difficult without more troops.
That's the price we pay when we ignore experience and put zeal in its place.
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"Wolfowitz said he found it hard to conceive that it would be harder to occupy Iraq than it had been to conquer it. This was a thing that was difficult to imagine, he said.
Far from being an imaginary concept, this idea that the occupation was the hard part was the heart of the Army's prewar argument."
From an interview with James Fallows:
Specific to prewar, what was the main reason the Army wanted so many troops -- why they thought the numbers that they were talking about were necessary?
The Army had both a specific and a larger metaphysical reason for wanting to have a lot of troops going in. The specific reason was their very precise argument that it would be harder to occupy Iraq than to conquer it. You would need a relatively small number of troops actually to beat Saddam Hussein's military, but then occupying this quite large and quite fractured country would be quite hard, and would take a lot of troops.
The metaphysical reason was the Army's sense that, once the sort of glory of the short war was over, the people that would actually be there would be the U.S. Army, not some international force, not the Air Force. The U.S. Army would be taking the heat for whatever went wrong. We wouldn't have enough of them there.
Explain the reasoning of the head of the U.S. Army, Gen. Shinseki, on how important the first days after the fall of Baghdad would be.
Shinseki of the Army drew not only on his experience in the Balkans, trying to administer a fractious region postwar. [He also drew from] all the corpus of evidence that had been produced by the Army War College, by every other group that looked into this, to say that there was a crucial moment just after the fall of a regime when the potential for disorder was enormous. So there would be ripple effects for years to come, depending on what happened in those first days or weeks when the regime went [down] ….
The Army War College study had worked out a very detailed checklist for how the military, and the Army in particular, should start thinking about the postwar, well before it actually went to war. One of their conclusions was that it was best to go in heavier than you actually needed to be, so that at the beginning of the postwar period your presence would be so intimidating that nobody would dare challenge you. You'd set a tone that would allow you then to draw down the forces very rapidly. So it was better to go in heavy and then draw down, than the reverse.
Shinseki based the need for more troops in part on his experience in Kosovo and Bosnia. Explain how he extrapolated.
Shinseki had been in charge of occupation logistics in Kosovo in particular. He said when in the Pentagon, "Well, let's assume the world is linear. If we required a certain amount of troops per 25,000 population in the Balkans, [and] if the world is not radically different, something of the same extent is going to be needed in Iraq." When he used that kind of extrapolation logic, he got to a number much, much larger than Donald Rumsfeld was thinking of for the troop presence.
In the tensions existing between the Pentagon and the military, Shinseki seemed a particular target. Explain.
Shinseki's last, say, year and a half in office was a series of apparently calculated and intentional insults from the civilian leadership, especially Donald Rumsfeld. The episode that got the most public attention was when Rumsfeld announced Shinseki's successor as chief of staff, about a year and a half before his term was up. Usually this announcement is made right at the last minute to avoid turning the incumbent into a lame duck.
Three weeks before the war, Shinseki testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Describe what happened.
Shinseki has been, through his career, a real by-the-book guy. So he would not go out of his way to make public disagreements that were clearly going on inside the Pentagon. But in the hearing where Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan was sort of drawing him out on what he expected the troop levels to be, Shinseki finally said, based on his own past experience, that he thought it would be several hundred thousand troops. This became a real arcane term about, what did several hundred thousand mean? But let's say 300,000 and up. His real level, internally, had been in the 400,000 range.
Several days later, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, appeared before a different committee. [He] went out of his way essentially to slap Shinseki in the face, to say there had been some recent estimates that had been wildly off the mark -- using the term, "wildly off the mark." Then he went on to say that it was almost impossible to imagine that it would be harder, and take more troops, to occupy Iraq than it had taken to conquer them; whereas that point, that it would be harder to occupy than conquer, was in fact the central theme the Army had been advancing before the war.
Was this public rebuke surprising?
The public rebuke of Shinseki by Wolfowitz was probably the most direct public dressing-down of a military officer, a four-star general, by a civilian superior since Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur, 50 years ago. This public confrontation between Wolfowitz and Shinseki must have reflected the really deep disagreements going on within the Pentagon then, and a sign of the civilian leadership's impatience with what they viewed as the lack of cooperation from the uniformed military.
A couple of days later, Paul Wolfowitz was testifying before another congressional committee. He went out of his way, in a gesture that everyone involved recognized as being directly addressed to Shinseki, to say, "Let me address some of the ideas that have been floating around recently." He went on to say there had been suggestions of the levels of troops that might be required that were, quote, "wildly off the mark."
This was not the way that generals and Pentagon superiors talked to each other.
What is his theory behind this, why he says this?
When Paul Wolfowitz was asked why he thought Shinseki's estimates were so wildly off the mark, first he used the sort of standard Pentagon line, especially under Donald Rumsfeld, which was really, "The future was unknowable." Of course the future is unknowable, although that line was used to excuse a failure to give any financial estimates, which was more irresponsible than it was unknowable.
Then he went on to say, first, he thought many things would go fairly easily. Countries like France were likely to help us in the reconstruction, that this was likely to go more easily than most people thought. Then he went on to make the crucial point that raised the main philosophical difference between the Army and the civilian leadership. Wolfowitz said he found it hard to conceive that it would be harder to occupy Iraq than it had been to conquer it. This was a thing that was difficult to imagine, he said.
Far from being an imaginary concept, this idea that the occupation was the hard part was the heart of the Army's prewar argument. |
